I am a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research Redmond and member of the Quantum Architectures and Computation (QuArC) group. Prior to joining MSR, I was a Senior Research Staff Member at NEC Laboratories America (2005-2013) and the leader of NEC's Quantum IT group. I was a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Quantum Computing, Waterloo, Canada (2003-2004). I received my Ph.D. degree from the University of Karlsruhe, Germany (2001). My research is centered around quantum algorithms, quantum error-correction, quantum circuits, and digital signal processing.

I am passionate about finding new examples of problems for which a quantum computer dramatically outperforms any classical computer. In particular, I am interested in problems where an exponential speedup compared to the best known classical algorithm can be achieved by using a quantum computer. Not many such problems are currently known, arguably the most well-known cases are Shor's algorithms for factoring and dlog and the simulation of a wide range of quantum mechanical systems on a quantum computer. A problem that I like in particular is the so-called hidden shift problem in which one has to identify an unknown offset in the argument of a function. I showed that for certain Boolean functions that are used in cryptography, such hidden shift problems can be solved efficiently, a result which was subsequently generalized to broader classes of functions.

Starting in 2011, I changed my research area almost completely and started to work on quantum programming languages, quantum circuit synthesis, and more generally, a compiler system that can break down higher-level algorithms into elementary gate sequences and that can perform resource estimation for a variety of physical machine descriptions.

Recently written

M. Grassl and M. Rötteler, Quantum MDS codes over small fields, in Proceedings of the 2015 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT'15), Hong Kong, IEEE – Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, June 2015.